AFF E-Newsletter

Vol. 3, No. 2

September 2004

On Conversations with
God

Is Neale Donald Walsch, the
founder of the Conversations with God
organization, a guru? Is the Conversations with
God organization a cult? These are the questions
that led me to the Living Enrichment Center in
Oregon in June, 2003 to attend the first ever
Humanity’s Team conference. Humanity’s Team is
the organization that Neale Donald Walsch founded
as part of the Conversations with God network,
and is geared toward literally saving the world
from disaster by embracing the main ideas in
Walsch’s book, The New Revelations

As in his previous books,
including Conversations With God: Books 1,2,3,
Friendship With God, and Communion With God, The
New Revelations focuses upon God as a
universal Buddhist kind of force that is both
within and without, part of each and every human
being, representing the deepest and noblest parts
of who we are. The essence of Walsch’s teachings
involves total freedom to follow your own deepest
and noblest instincts and inclinations; for
Walsch these are portrayed as literal
conversations with God. In The New
Revelations Walsch goes further, claiming
that all the problems in the world ultimately
stem from people thinking that their
spiritual/religious beliefs are the one and only
true beliefs about God and the universe. Walsch
calls for a cultivated humility and openness in
all people to other points of view in the
spiritual/religious context, claiming that there
is no ultimate right or wrong. His organization,
Humanity’s Team, as part of the umbrella
organization Conversations With God, has been
established essentially to spread Walsch’s
teachings in The New Revelations, referred
to as The New Spirituality to all the people of
the world.

As Neale Donald Walsch
claims to have had the experience of speaking
directly with God, he could be viewed as being a
medium or channel for a higher spiritual force,
in a somewhat similar way that Helen Schucman
could be viewed as being a channel of a higher
spiritual energy when she wrote A Course in
Miracles. Personally I don’t view either of
these two spiritual experiences as involving an
external God or communion with Jesus (in the case
of Helen Schucman), but rather as deep-level
spiritual experiences within their own selves.
Ken Wilber describes these experiences
brilliantly as the subtle, causal, and non-dual
levels in his book, Sex, Ecology, And
Spirituality. But as Walsch himself
discusses in his books, he has quite a large ego
and has to be continuously careful not to fall
into the trap of being made into a guru by his
many ardent followers, as millions of people have
read Walsch’s books and feel very inspired by
him. There are strong connections with the well
known new age synchronicity ideas of James
Redfield (The Celestine Prophesy) as well
as the mind over matter prayer ideas of Larry
Dossey (The Recovery Of The Soul),
expressed concretely as “your experiences follow
from your beliefs”—in a very similar way to the
foundational philosophy of Harry Palmer’s new age
spiritual organization, “Avatar,” founded a few
years before “Conversations with God: Book 1”
appeared. The whole series of books is filled
with a kind of humor and wit and
unpretentiousness which has reached the hearts of
a great many people. Thus, it seemed like it was
time for me to experience firsthand what Neale
Donald Walsch and Conversations with God was
truly all about.

The initial part of the
Humanity’s Team conference was conducted over a
weekend and attended by nearly 1,000 people. Out
of these nearly 1,000 people, 135 people,
including me, had opted to pay the additional
$650 to spend a few extra intensive days with
Neale Donald Walsch to be instructed in the New
Spirituality on a higher level; this was called
the Teaching the Teachers Tutorial. The cost of
the retreat was quite reasonable, as it included
food and lodging in a beautiful rustic Oregon
setting. The Living Enrichment Center is widely
known as the brainchild of Reverend Mary Morrisey,
an inspiring author and speaker in her own right.

But getting back to the
question at hand, when people ask me if a
particular spiritual organization is a cult, I
try to explain to them that the term “cult” is
not an all-or-nothing term, but rather a gradual
continuum of behaviors that range from
exceedingly dangerous to quite mild. There are a
number of cult description scales in use, and one
of the most comprehensive and useful scales that
I have seen can be found in Neopagan leader Isaac
Bonewits’s book, Real Magic. The
behaviors that Bonewits focuses upon include
overpowering ego of a charismatic leader,
authoritarian control by this same leader,
exorbitant financial demands, coercive pressures
to recruit new members, alienation from those who
are not members of the spiritual organization,
adversity and animosity to other viewpoints,
dogmatic beliefs in the absolute truth of
everything the leader says, etc. Yes, Walsch has
a big ego and is most definitely a theatrical
charismatic leader who loves to be on stage.
Yes, Conversations with God is run by Walsch in
an essentially authoritarian manner. And yes, I
must also admit that what I consider to be beyond
reasonable high costs have recently been
instituted in some Conversations with God
programs. For example, their Leadership
Education program costs nearly $10,000 over a 3
year period or $12,500 on a fast track
three-month special deal. This does not sit well
with me; neither does the recent increase in
prices of the “Recreating Yourself” and “Being
It” workshops from $300 or $400 to $1,250. I
honestly did not expect to be confronted with
these financial blocks to go further in the
Conversations with God organization, but I
immediately found this to be an unpleasant
surprise when I arrived at the conference.
Walsch and the Humanity’s Team leaders also made
it clear from the outset of the conference that
we were expected to take the New Spirituality
home to our communities after the conference was
over.

However, Walsch had also
surrounded himself at the conference with well
known new age leaders who did not seem to have
the ego/guru kind of problems and challenges that
Walsch has. These leaders included Barbara Marx
Hubbard, futurist author and founder of the
Foundation Of Conscious Evolution, Voluntary
Simplicity author Duane Elgin, popular
ex-actor Dennis Weaver (Chester on “Gunsmoke”),
Korean spiritual leader Ilchi Lee, Living
Enrichment Center founder and author Reverend
Mary Morrissey, and popular love author Daphne
Rose Kingma. But will Walsch listen to these
people when it comes time to make the important
decisions that truly distinguish a positive,
safe, beneficial spiritual organization from a
dangerous, manipulative spiritual cult? It was
so touching to me how 73-year-old Barbara Marx
Hubbard honestly admitted to a group of people at
the conference that Neale Donald Walsch has a big
ego problem and that she sees part of her own
role in Humanity’s Team as offering balance to
Walsch’s overwhelming powerful masculine ego.
Yes, Walsch had the good sense to surround
himself at the conference with these truly
enlightened beings who have been able to allow
the real and pure essence of the New Spirituality
to permeate their inner state of being without
the need of on-stage theatrics. However, as the
weekend part of the conference came to a close, I
became concerned that all of Walsch’s safeguard
true spiritual colleagues would not be at the
second half of the conference. He had his small
group of devoted followers who carry out his
instructions to organize Humanity’s Team and
would be with him the rest of the workshop. But
these people were by no means the kind of people
whom I considered to be independent thinkers and
inspiring spiritual beings. I was somewhat
scared, especially as I had heard that Walsch
primarily intended to lecture us for many hours
non-stop, and I knew that this was not how I
assimilate material in a good way. It was not my
intention to start a Humanity’s Team Center in
Maine, which seemed to be what the organization
was hoping I would end up doing once I returned
home.

As the second part of the
conference began, it became increasingly clear to
me that Neale Donald Walsch is tremendously
powerful, has an enormous ego problem (more than
just “big”), and is overwhelmingly flamboyant,
theatrical, controlling, and impactful. It made
sense to me that these were the qualities that
had enabled him to gather such a massive
following for his Conversations with God
movement. But I also had the feeling that Walsch
was somehow deeply genuine and authentic on the
inside, and he truly believed that he had
received the divine inspiration and message of
God. Walsch loves to lecture and tell
spontaneous jokes for hours upon end, sharing
whatever comes into his mind at the moment. His
ability to capture the audience through prolonged
intellectual stimulation mixed with taking people
through deep individual processes reminded me of
the powerful abilities and demonstrations of the
est trainers whom I had encountered back in the
1970s. However, what finally persuaded me to
give Walsch the benefit of the doubt in regard to
his dangerous guru aspects was a rather daring
step that I took relatively early on in the
second half of the Humanity’s Team conference.

I have always disagreed with
Walsch’s belief that there is no right or wrong;
i.e. on the deeper level of the soul everything
is good. Hitler and Nazi Germany are enough
reason for me to believe in evil and the
existence of right and wrong, and I do not choose
to believe otherwise. As Walsch began lecturing
non-stop for many hours and went on and on about
his right/wrong philosophy, I found myself
becoming quite low key and disillusioned with
Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God, and
Humanity’s Team. But during the meal breaks
people would always ask me how I was doing, and I
found myself honestly conveying to people how I
felt and what I thought. Various people
encouraged me to express my views to Walsch,
either privately or in front of the group. It
was challenging enough obtaining the microphone
to ask a question, as Walsch does tend to
dominate the stage, to say the least. Even
though I still wanted to consider myself to be
part of Humanity’s Team and practicing the New
Spirituality, it felt quite terrifying to me when
I thought of telling Neale Donald Walsch that I
disagreed with one of his major new revelations
in front of 135 people when Walsch is the public
theatrical master and I am shy speaking up in
large groups. But Walsch was highly sensitive to
the emotion in my voice, and immediately said
that I did not need to agree with everything he
said to be on Humanity’s Team and practice the
New Spirituality. And I witnessed all my inner
turmoil immediately leave me, as Neale Donald
Walsch and I stared at each other, with an
openness and mutual understanding that I never
dreamed would ever have taken place. And this is
when I made the decision that Neale Donald
Walsch, egocentric and overpowering as his
outward personality may be, is not a dangerous
guru and Conversations with God is not a
manipulative cult.

In conclusion, I can say now
that I have experienced Conversations with God
and Neale Donald Walsch on a much deeper level
than I had been able to before I attended the
2003 Humanity’s Team conference. I encourage
people to explore Neale Donald Walsch and
Conversations with God as well as the New
Spirituality and Humanity’s Team, but with a
reasonable degree of caution mixed with a healthy
grain of salt in regard to the many things that
Neale Donald Walsch claims to know through his
conversations with God.